These scans show a 62-year-old man with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The picture on the left was taken in in December 2015, the one on the right three months after treatment with an experimental gene therapy at the Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston ASBMT/Kite Pharma via AP

Experimental cancer drug's 'extraordinary' results

A private drug company has developed an experimental cancer drug that has produced apparently "extraordinary" results, with a third of very ill lymphoma patients showing no signs of the disease after a single treatment.

However the company, Kite Pharma, cautioned that its version of CAT-T cell therapy may have also killed two of the 101 people in the study.

The patients had non-Hodgkin lymphoma and all other treatments had failed. Normally they could expect to live for about six months.

Nearly nine months later, more than a third showed no sign of the disease and more than half were still alive.

The treatment uses gene therapy to prompt the patient's blood cells to attack cancer. In total 82 per cent of patients saw their tumours shrink by half or more at some point in the study.

One patient, Dimas Padilla, 43, of Orlando, credited the treatment with saving his life.

He had been told his cancer was getting worse and his treatment was failing. "I was thinking how am I going to tell this to my mother, my wife, my children," he said.

But in August, he had CAR-T therapy and subsequently saw his tumours "shrink like ice cubes". He is now in complete remission.

"They were able to save my life," Mr Padilla said.

And independent expert, Dr Roy Herbst, cancer medicines chief at the Yale Cancer Centre, was taken aback by the treatment's success.

"This seems extraordinary … extremely encouraging," he said.

However Dr Herbst said further studies were needed to see if the benefit of the treatment was lasting or if the patients' cancer returned.

"This certainly is something I would want to have available [to patients]," he said.